Interesting new journal

I use a piece of kombu in my beans, and make dashi and miso fairly often, so this article about flavor in seaweed was really interesting to me.

Flavour

Which for some reason reminds me of my very first serious cooking moment, my friend Tammy and I often went out to eat at Chinese restaurants with my parents, ethnic back then meant either Vescios or a Chinese restaurant.  One day over at her house we decided to recreate egg drop soup.  We boiled some water, "dropped" the beaten eggs in, and added salt.  We showed her mom Pauline, one of the great cooking influences of my life, who suggested we start with broth and gave us some stock cubes.  I am pretty sure Tammy and I trashed their kitchen that day making batch after batch of egg drop soup.  The idea that I could eat something made by a "real" cook, think about it, and then recreate it was born at that moment.  I can't remember when Tammy and her family moved from that house across the street, but we were pretty young, and that memory is definitely in the old house kitchen.

One of my other favorite memories of food and that kitchen is the wild grape vines that grew up the power pole in the back yard.  When the grapes were ripe Pauline would call the power company to come cut down the vines, and then she would make grape jelly I can't eat grape jelly without smelling the grapes boiling in that kitchen in the angling late summer light and the feel of the open windows and the giant grape vine mess in the back yard.

Egg Drop Soup


A very small step up from the original kitchen egg drop soup:

Heat some flavorful chicken broth, taste for salt and pepper, and add a few drops of rice vinegar, gluten free Tamari, and sesame oil.  You could add some red pepper flakes if you wanted to be fancy.

Beat a few eggs in a measuring cup.  With the soup at a simmer gently stir the soup while pouring the egg in in a thin stream.

Put the soup in bowls and garnish with finely sliced green onions and perhaps a drop more of sesame oil.

I think I am going to teach my children how to make egg drop soup later today.

My grand unification theory of weight, or, how modern food lies

Pork chops and bean stew, hyper-palatable?

Stephan Guyenet posted this interesting essay about weight and the reward hypothesis there of.  So I thought I would try to articulate my own theory in the simplest possible terms, which I think incorporates many of the things I have read about food reward.  Keep in mind I am an art teacher who has read a lot about diet and nutrition.  I am certainly not up to date in all of the research.  But the current consensus, while having a lot of merit doesn't include many of the observations I have made about my own body.

As I understand it there are two ways to sense flavor in food.  The taste buds are a sort of blunt instrument which perceive saltiness, bitterness, sweetness, sourness, and perhaps umami and fat, though perhaps fat is a mouth feel/consistency perception.  We also have scent receptors which perceive the direction an odor is coming from, if it comes in through your nose (ortho nasally) it is registered as a smell, if it comes up from your throat and mouth (retro nasally) then it registers as a taste.  Depending on whose theory you believe those odor/taste molecules are perceived because of their shape or their vibration.  They are more and less precise depending probably on genetics, use, and skill.  There are well recognized super smellers or "noses" who have incredibly discriminating scent/taste perceptions.  But everyone can detect a remarkable range of chemicals with their scent/flavor receptors.  There are also "taste" receptors in your digestive system.

Interesting side note: even though the chemicals are the same, and the sensor is the same, smells and taste molecules are processed in totally different parts of the brain.  I need a term to differentiate the taste bud taste from the aroma taste by the way.  At any rate, the smell of strawberries is processed in a different place than the strawberry gas that drifts up through your sinuses retro nasally.  How cool is that?  I am not a super smeller like my mom, but I have a very acute sense of flavor molecules, I suspect that's because I focus on aroma and flavor.  The part of my brain that processes that information is rehearsed.

So the question is, why?  Why do we have these taste systems?  People who lose their sense of smell are at significant risk of eating rotten food and getting sick.  We are pretty good at smelling when food has gone bad.  That's a good reason.  My mom is a super smeller, she can detect smells in minute amounts and long before anyone else.  But she doesn't like cooking and can't recognize small amounts of herbs in a dish like I can.  She can smell slightly off milk from a mile away.  My mom throws away a lot of food other people would keep using for days.

The taste buds seem to be a system for making sure we can recognize macronutrients, our salty and bitter receptors help us perceive minerals in our foods, our sweet receptors help us perceive carbohydrates, our umami sense helps us perceive amino acids, etc.  I would love to see research into people without a sense of smell and their habits around macronutrients and their micronutrient status.  Some people have a much denser distribution of taste buds than other people, my family always calls me a super-taster, but I am not.  Super tasters often don't enjoy food as much as non-super tasters, they have a lot of aversions.  I would love to know if there is a relationship between super-tasting and weight.  I would predict super tasters would be more slender than not.

As Proust pointed out, our sense of smell, and in my personal case my sense of taste, are directly wired into our strongest memories.  I believe that we come to associate specific tastes and smells with the nutrients those foods contain.  That all that direct connection between smells and tastes and learning are to help us remember where to find food (I smell honey, I remember getting lot's of carbs when I smelled that before, reward-anticipation kicks in, I find honey, I eat honey, my body registers carbs, I am rewarded, I remember.)  We also, and often very dramatically use our senses of taste and smell to learn aversions, I couldn't eat pizza for years after an unfortunate morning sickness pizza incident.

The sense of smell and taste are very discriminating, I can often identify individual herbs in a dish.  And sometimes I have huge overwhelmingly strong cravings for specific herbs.  I figure that is my body saying, hey, remember the last time you smelled that smell?  Tasted that taste?  When that happened I got something I needed, do that again, 'kay?

This is of course directly related to all the reward and palatability Stephan and his fellow researchers are talking about.  I eat something my body needs, it likes it, it rewards me, I do it again, I (and my body, which seem to have become separated in this little narrative) win.  Where I differ from the direction the current research is going is that I don't buy that crappy processed food is "hyper-palatable." (Though, according to the glossary Stephan has started to put at the bottom of his posts it is, so maybe I just have a nomenclature disagreement with him.) I don't think our bodies are that stupid.  That the food companies have figured out what ingredients they can add to food cheaply to make us eat a lot is clear, but I don't think that's the whole story.

Here is my thought, I think the food learning process is being interrupted/fooled by foods that have the tastes and smells of nutrients that aren't there.  My body learned to associate citrus aromas, and sour taste bud stimulus with vitamin C, and probably all manner of bioflavonoids and other nutrients in citrus.  I often have strong cravings for citrus aromas and sour tastes. When I am camping and don't eat fresh foods that have vitamin C I get overwhelming cravings for sour things.  Sour candies can help in the short term, they have the aromas and taste I am craving.  But my body isn't getting what it wants, so the craving comes back making me eat another sour candy.  That sets up an addictive cycle.

Interesting side note, I am not the only one.  People living in Minnesota forts in pioneer times ate mostly salt pork and grains and beans.  They had casks of citrus juice shipped to them, which they fermented and added to alcohol. If you are camping a flask of lemon juice/honey/brandy which you add a dash of to your tea can stave off the citrus cravings.  The pioneers called it shrub.

I suspect that after enough learning the body starts rewarding the taste, rather than wait for conformation from the digestion about the actual nutritional content of the food.  That's the reward the researchers are talking about.  If I really need a nutrient such as C, or perhaps something else in citrus, my body will reward me for eating the sour/fruity candies, even though the nutrients aren't there, but it will send me the craving signal again as soon as it realizes I was faking it out.  Research into drug addicts shows that the dopamine starts flowing as soon as they anticipate the dose.  More dopamine - reward occurs as they ready their paraphernalia, the sensory information is ahead of the actual chemical stimulant.

If I find a patch of fresh raspberries or thimbleberries while I am camping I get immediate  physical feedback from my body that make me want to eat them.  My sour craving intensifies, I produce saliva, and even if I am near my camp site or have a really heavy pack I will stop and pick and eat those berries.  When I do, my sour craving is satisfied and doesn't come back.  I don't have to eat sour candies if there are berries around.  The berries are satiating, or they satisfy my craving.  But I have a raspberry patch in my garden and I almost never go out and eat every berry I can find, because my at home diet probably has plenty of whatever the raspberries have.  I have often been in a situation where I could eat all the berries I want, and I stop after about 300-400 calories of berries, which is a heck of a lot, but not outrageous.

If I could carry enough sour candies I would probably eat thousands of calories of them while camping.  I would never get the signal to stop because they don't have what my body wants, even though they taste like they do.  If I carry vitamin C lozenges they are more satiating, though not as satiating as the berries, there are probably any number of not-yet-discovered nutrients that my body gets from the berries that are not in the lozenges, but at least I am getting the C.

I think the issue with modern processed foods isn't that it is hyper-palatable, I think the issue is that it is carefully crafted to communicate that it has certain nutrients, but it doesn't actually have them.  The flavor triggers the reward, like the sight of a needle will trigger dopamine for a heroin addict, but the food can't deliver, so like the heroin addict isn't satisfied with the little hit of dopamine, the eater isn't satisfied with the food.  But they are motivated to try again, because the cue their body has learned was present, the reward was triggered.  The problem with modern processed food is that it is nutrient poor, while having the flavors of foods with nutrients.  The problem is, it lies.

But all that sophisticated communication about what we are eating isn't just about getting us to eat the right nutrients, it's also about processing the things we eat.  The tastes we taste are how our body knows what enzymes, what hormones to release as we eat.  Even thinking about eating specific foods can cause those physical changes.  But what happens when we lie to our body with our food?  I believe that our body learns we are unreliable.  Take diet soda for an example, you taste the sweet taste, your body releases insulin to deal with the sugar... that never arrives.  Now the closely regulated sugar that was circulating in your blood is getting shuffled off to storage because of all the extra insulin.  Half an hour later you have to either release some glycogen from your liver or eat some carbs.  Also, next time you taste something sweet your body might not release enough insulin, it's not dumb, it learns.  But what if this time that sweet taste is a real soda?  Crap, now you are damaging your tissues with too much blood sugar.

I suspect that the more unreliable messages you send your body over time the higher your body moves it's set point.  I also suspect that some people who are over weight are either not getting the nutrients they need so their body in a desperate attempt to get those nutrients just keeps sending out the hunger signals hoping to get enough.  As our food has become less nutrient dense (which lot's of research says it has) we need to eat more to get the basic nutrients we need.  Set point moves up, that's how many calories we need to get the basics.  I think one of the benefits of exercise is that it uses the extra calories that you need to eat to get the nutrients, and if you are some how damaged in your ability to get enough nutrients, or you have taught your body that you are completely unreliable no amount of exercise will matter.

Many magazine articles suggest that we eat less dense foods, watery soups to fill the tummy and "satisfy us" or fill us up.  I think that is the exact opposite of what we should do.  I think we should eat the most nutrient dense lowest volume foods.  I think way to much attention is paid to the stretch receptors in the stomach, and nowhere near enough attention is paid to the nutrient composition of our food.  If my body gets the message that no matter how much I stretch my tummy I won't get enough nutrients, than I will only stop eating when my stomach is super stretched.  If my body gets the message that I will get all that I need in a moderate amount of food, then I will be satisfied with less.  That has absolutely played out for me.  A few ounces of meat satisfies me like cups and cups of bean and whole grain salads didn't.  Because the meat has the protein I need, but maybe also because it has carnatine, or usable iron, or some other thing I needed that wasn't in the way more caloric beans and grains.

I haven't quite worked them in to this theory yet, but I am interested in Seth Roberts Shangri la diet, which is the opposite of diet soda, in other words lots of calories no taste.  Also, even though I give myself permission to eat whatever I want at Thanksgiving, including massive amounts of carbohydrates, my blood sugar never goes very high.  Whereas if I eat an entire baked potato with a normal dinner my blood sugar shoots up.  Thanksgiving is a high anticipation meal for me, I think about what I am going to cook, and what I am going to eat, for days.  I cook all day long and think about what I will be eating.  And when I eat it, my body is ready for it.  I remember hearing a study of diabetic Muslims who had no problem with controlling their blood sugar during religious fasts, but would have serious problems with low blood sugar if they missed a meal.  Our anticipation and thinking about foods is powerful.  So if we consume a lot of food related media, might that be interpreted as unreliable information for our body?  I love reading cooking magazines, I have a very vivid taste memory/imagination and can often taste the recipe as I read it.  Am I getting the little hit of dopamine when I do?

What happens to people who never get nutrients they need?  Who never have the opportunity to learn the flavor associations with vital nutrients?  Is this why formula fed babies have a greater risk of obesity? Is there a window of opportunity beyond which you cannot learn those relationships?  Can we create people who have a complete disconnect between their sense of taste/smell and what their body needs?

Another interesting thought I have had is that I seem to be controlling my blood sugar much better since I started planning my meals.  I know what I am going to cook, and I can mentally prepare for it.  Also, the amount of carbohydrate is predictable, and my meal times are more regular too.  However, my weight set point has gone up about 10 pounds.  My anticipation helps me process the food, but am I lying to my body by thinking about what I am going to eat?

I don't disagree entirely with the reward research in weight, in fact my recommendations are probably exactly the same as Stephan Guyenet's, I just think there is more going on then that crappy processed foods taste so good we over eat them, which is what a lot of the writing about food reward seems to boil down to.

Edited to add:


I think Melissa at Hunt.Gather.Love may share many of my reservations about the current theory of food-reward.  Please read her article here.

Paul Jaminet seems to agree with me as well.  Or, at any rate isn't quite on board with food-reward as it is currently advertised.

Though, let me take this moment to re-iterate that Stephan Guyenet is a very excellent blogger, seems to be a level-headed scientist, and also seems to be a nice guy.  I have no argument with him, and his reporting of the research and consensus amongst obesity researchers.  I do believe that respectful disagreement is one great way to increase the total of knowledge.

Lunch some lovely day last week

Chicken feta sausage with sauteed veggies and that may be the sun shining through a glass of wine.

The side plate you can see on the left had a few pieces of dark chocolate, several walnuts, and a few orange wedges.  For dessert, you know.

Fish tacos version 2.0, mince, and green shredded pork

I made fish tacos on Monday again, and they were an even bigger hit.  This time I made the same marinade, but I picked the pieces of fish out of the marinade and rolled them in masa harina (dry) and then fried them in my stainless pan in some coconut oil.  The sprouted corn tortillas I like fall apart if you steam them warm, so this week we put them on cookie sheets, put cheese on them, and broiled them.  We constructed our fish, cabbage, and guacamole tacos on top of these melty cheesy tortillas, and they were very good.  Very messy, but very good.

Mince and whatever strange thing Scottish people call parsnips

Tonight we had my take on Mince.  I never actually had mince in Scotland, it is almost always made with gravy thickened with flour, but I like the thought of it so I keep making my own version.  I am sure an actual Scottish person would be horrified.  Tonight I sauteed an onion, peppers, carrots, and celery in some butter till a bit brown, added a pound of hamburger (by volume about equal to the veggies,) and browned the hamburger.  I added a few ounces of tomato puree, a few squirts of ketchup, a splash of the red boat fish sauce (as a Worcestershire sauce substitute) and enough water to make it a gravy consistency.  I simmered it while I sauteed some mushrooms, sliced some tomatoes, and made parsnip and potato hash.  The vegetarians had baked beans and fried eggs with their hash.  My younger son declared he hates fried eggs, and then proceeded to eat four of them.  Not an elegant meal by any means, but good and very filling for the kids running off to rehearsals.

I also did the prep work for tomorrows green pork chili.  It's all set in the crock pot liner in the fridge, we just have to take it out and plop it in the crock pot base in the morning, let it come to room temperature, and then turn on the crock pot and head to work.

Green shredded pork

I quartered 8 or 9 tomatillos, a huge onion, a green bell pepper, and two jalapenos.  I added several cloves of garlic, and a good big pinch of cumin seeds, and a splash of coconut oil.  I roasted the veggies in a 400 oven until they were getting some brown roastiness and had collapsed a bit.  While the veggies roasted I browned a 3 pound bone in pork butt.  The co-op meat department has been cutting more bone in cuts and pricing them much cheaper, which is a win-win for the slow cooking cuts.  The bone gives you added flavor and nutrition and you save money.  The veg went in the bottom of the crock, the meat on top, and I had saved the fish marinade which was onion, cilantro, lots of lime juice, salt, and peppers so I threw that in as well.  It will get plenty cooked enough to kill any raw fish germs in the crock pot.  I deglazed the pan I browned the pork in with a cup of water and poured the water and all the crunchy brown bits over the top of the meat.  When I get home I will pick out the bones, shred the meat into the sauce, add lime juice, salt and pepper, and chopped cilantro.  I will serve it with mashed and fried red chili beans, vegetable garnishes like lime wedges, diced avocado, chopped fresh onion, etc. And quesadillas for the kids.  I didn't add chicken broth this time, I am looking for more of a shredded pork with sauce texture rather than a soup texture.

Weekly shopping 3/18/2012

Despite carefully setting it aside when I rushed off for my busy day I have somehow lost my receipt for grocery shopping on Sunday.  I went over my budget again this week, I am finding that I do fine buying the meat, the vegetables, and the dairy, but what kills me is the non-weekly but still required staples.  The olive oil, salt, and gluten free Tamari are what push me over.  Is it cheating to count them separately?  Yes, I need them to cook.  Maybe I just have to budget for 100 dollars more a month to stock up on monthly staples.  This week it was salt and honey that did me in.  I like local minimally processed honey, but its 14 bucks for a pint jar.  I have been using a very old box of run of the mill kosher salt for weeks, but I finally broke down and bought the mined Richmond Red Salt that I prefer.  Two bags, one fine and one course. 

I remember that I had %56 P6, so that was pretty good.  

I bought a 3 pound pork butt roast, 1.5 pounds of wild cod, a 2 pound Eye of Round, a package of organic all beef hotdogs, a bison summer sausage, and .5 pounds each of chorizo and breakfast sausage.  We still have a bunch of chicken in the freezer from the sale two weeks ago.  And we are still slowly using up the ground beef we bought months ago.  

I arranged my produce much more attractively this week, so I will let it speak for itself.  I did cheat and put the produce front and center, so here are some close ups of the packaged stuff. 

And the bags of beans and vegetables.  I buy my mushrooms in paper bags, and they stay good all week.  A plastic bag retains too much water and they get slimy.  By the end of the week they may be a bit shriveled, but they are still full of mushroomy flavor.

Just look at all that lovely produce.  Really, we live in amazing times.  All of the produce was organic this week by the way, and the parsnips, tomatoes, lettuce, and rutabagas were local.  The bananas were equal exchange, so fair trade.

What I ended up doing with six almost over the hill peppers

I roasted and peeled them, and made a lovely salad with balsamic vinaigrette and shaved parmesan.  I served them with carrots and fennel.

I roasted poblanos to go with the fish tacos tonight.

I am probably going to roast some more bell peppers for the green pork on Wednesday.  I had planned on saving a poblano, but I forgot and ate them all.

Bell peppers are one of the foods that I couldn't eat at all before I gave up gluten, and now I eat them all the time.  I love the taste of them, and they are so darn easy.  I eat way more dairy now, after a life time of suffering through lactose intolerance it's pretty fun to now be able to eat as much dairy as I want.  I could always have a little yogurt or cheese, but never a lot, ice cream made me seriously ill.  About a year after giving up gluten I started to notice that I could eat more yogurt, more cheese.  I started cautiously adding other dairy.  I still wouldn't drink cups of milk, but mostly because I never really got used to that much dairy and I don't have the taste for it.

Spring is coming!

Plum blossoms getting ready

Actually, as near as I can tell we skipped spring and went directly to some sort of strange brown plant-less summer.  Last year it snowed on May 14 as I left for work, I cried the entire car ride because I was so done with winter and really, May 14 snow?  (Average last day of frost for Minneapolis is May 15, it's not that outlandish, but it was a hard winter last year.)  But, here, let me show you the strangeness this year.  My Maple tree is in full bloom.  I would say it's a month early?

My pussy willows are almost done, here they are a few days ago, the light was bad tonight, but I hope to catch their full yellow blossom tomorrow.

Chives and sorrel are up and almost ready to start nibbling.

And strawberries and rhubarb are on their way.  The lilacs are leafing out, but they hardly count.  I could easily turn my garden and plant stuff, but for all I know we could still get a foot of snow.  I will be kicking myself for not planting if we don't.  Maybe I could find some spinach seeds to throw in.  Radishes would probably do okay either way.

Weekly dinner menu, 3/18/2012

Sorry I am late posting, we were out of town on Friday-Saturday, and then spent Sunday helping a friend paint at her new house, and helping another friend out around his house.  I did my grocery shopping right when the co-op opened Sunday, and it was easily the most pleasant Sunday shopping trip I have had.  Going early is the plan from now on.  I did make dinner between painting and helping my friend, but whew, it was a busy day!

Sunday: Beef stew, cauliflower cheese (like macaroni and cheese, but with steamed cauliflower instead of noodles,) mashed potatoes, beet and greens salad with walnuts.

Monday: Fish tacos, but I'm going to fry the fish this time, and do something different with the tortillas too.  Guacamole and other fish taco fixings, lettuce and cabbage salad.

Tuesday: Scottish mince (onion and gravy with hamburger in it, I make mine a little tomatoey.) Baked beans and fried eggs, roast parsnips, sauteed mushrooms, fresh tomatoes.

Wednesday: Green pork chili in the crock-pot, refried beans with cheese, rice, crudites, and avocado.

Thursday: I have a meeting after work, so David will make hamburgers, baked potatoes with cheese sauce (unless it's crazy warm again, then maybe potato pancakes for the vegetarians, with baked beans on the side?) steamed broccoli and carrots.

Friday: Can you believe we still have the chicken drumsticks in the freezer from two weeks ago?  Maybe we will actually make them this week.  I made a cool casserole dish in my ceramics class that I am dying to use, so I think I will make some manner of baked chicken thing, with some rice and maybe some prunes, sort of mid-eastern spices.  The vegetarians will get hummus, yogurt, and rice.  Green beans for the vegetable.  I didn't buy prunes, so I may make a special trip.  We do have some raisins hanging around though, so maybe not.

Saturday: Roast eye of round, savory custards, mashed sweet potatoes and parsnips, vegetable medley (that's whatever vegetables are still left at the end of the week,) fruit salad.

We will have eggs, oatmeal, yogurt, and I bought some chorizo for a spicy breakfast one day.
Lunches will be left over dinner in thermoses for the kids as much as possible.  I soaked and cooked some garbanzos today and am planning on making rice overnight in the rice cooker, so the kids get that for lunch on Tuesday.  I have to work full time all week, woe is me, so I am packing leftovers too.  I bought a package of hot dogs for emergency protein and I have a hot dog packed for my lunch tomorrow already.  My student teacher gave me a hard boiled egg today, because I forgot to bring my lunch.  So sad.  I had a beet salad and some left over stew when I got home though.

Ways of knowing

On the way home from work today I heard a "cooking expert" casually dismiss soaking beans.  I have been thinking ever since about the different ways we have of knowing information, and how easy it is to get lost.  I have an example that I think is telling.

For years women told one another that you could cure a UTI by drinking cranberry juice, no one new why it worked, but it worked so often for so many women that word got around.  Science decided to test the cranberry juice theory, who knows, maybe all these women were on to something.  The theory was that cranberry juice must acidify the urine so much it killed bacteria, so the scientists gave different test subjects different amounts of cranberry juice and tested the PH of the urine, and it turned out no matter how much cranberry juice you gave the women it didn't really change the PH.  Cranberry juice for UTIs was declared an old wives tale, and Doctors everywhere rolled their eyes at patients who insisted that the juice worked.

Meanwhile, many people for whom it did in fact work stopped believing in science a little bit.

We know now that cranberry juice does indeed reduce the duration and frequency of UTIs, but by a totally different mechanism than was expected.  Turns out there is a sugar in cranberry juice that humans don't digest, that is cleared in urine, that sugar blocks the part of E. Coli bacteria that normally latches on to the urinary tract, allowing the bacteria to be washed away.

There is no question that well designed scientific research is a very good way of proving and disproving things, perhaps the best way we have right now.  But there are a number of limitations to science.  One major limitation is the tendency of humans to pay more attention to evidence that supports their bias, and disregard the limits of that evidence.  The doctors and scientists didn't want to believe that cranberry juice helped UTIs, though they were willing to test it just in case.  When their test was negative they were completely comfortable rejecting any possible mechanism for cranberry juice to work.  In fact their test just showed that cranberry juice didn't work by acidifying urine.

Another great example is food and acne.  Many people have noticed that their diet impacts their acne.  Various food culprits have been blamed.  If you ask a doctor they will tell you in total certainty that food has no impact on acne.  All the people who see their diet impacting their acne stop believing their doctors a little when that happens.  Apparently the research the doctors are quoting was one brief study comparing a group that ate a chocolate bar with a group that ate a candy bar with no chocolate.  I hope you can see the gross limitations of that research.

So back to the beans.  Harold McGee, a very interesting food writer, wrote a book called "On Food and Cooking."  He wanted to test whether soaking beans increased their digestibility.  Indigestible polysaccharides are blamed for the gas promoting effect of beans, we can't digest certain sugars, but the microbes in our gut can, and they over grow and produce gas.  So McGee soaked some beans, measured the sugar content of the soaking water, and determined that soaking didn't increase the sugar in the water, and if you think about it, how could soaking leach out more than a tiny fraction of the polysaccharides from the beans any way?  Soaking was declared unnecessary.  Most people who write about food have read McGee, or at least heard of him, so the don't bother soaking message is really wide spread.  The food expert on the radio was almost certainly referencing McGee today.  By the way, I think McGee is a smart guy, and I have learned a lot from his books.

But it turns out that much of the problem with beans and grains is in phytates and other anti-nutrients which the plant uses to defend itself.  Mice and other animals produce a lot of phytase, an enzyme that digests the phytates.  Healthy cows have micro-organisms in their rumen that produce phytase, and some lucky humans have robust intestinal flora that can help them digest beans with no problem.  Soaking and thus partially sprouting beans activates all sorts of enzymes as the living bean begins the process of growing into a plant.  If beans aren't a huge part of your diet, if you are getting ample vitamins and minerals from other sources, than traditional soaking is probably enough.

People all over the world have figured out that soaking beans makes them more digestible, and eating them with certain herbs also helps.  I have noticed that when I soak beans for a good long time (changing the water regularly) that they have a better texture, a better flavor, and they don't bother my tummy as much.  They are more pleasurable to me, and they help me feel connected to a long tradition of cooking and eating.  Beans taste best if you eat them with spices in the cumin/fennel/caraway family and herbs like rosemary, oregano, cilantro, and epazote.   Cultures that have eaten beans for a long time flavor them with those spices and herbs, they soak and ferment the beans.

I don't eat beans very often any more, they move my blood sugar too far too fast.  But I do feed them to my vegetarian children, what are the alternatives?  Soy dogs and wheat gluten burgers?  When I do feed beans to my kids, I prepare them carefully, and I trust to thousands of years of human experimentation to figure out how to make them as safe as I can.  This doesn't mean that I reject scientific research, I understand it as a very important way of knowing.  But that research is dependent on figuring out a good hypothesis, figuring out a correct test, and don't forget actually getting the research funded.  In the mean time, I can use other ways of knowing to make choices, and conveniently they tend to be more aesthetically pleasing.

Here is an article at Weston Price about preparing beans and grains.

Here is a lovely post by one of my favorite bloggers about her experiences with food intolerances and figuring out what she needs to eat to feel well.

Paleo, or what?

When I was a very little girl my mom and I were vegetarians, it was the 70s, my mom was a peace activist, it's what you did back then.  There was even a brief period of living on a communal farm and some toying with Macrobiotics.  My mom tells a hilarious story about my Grandma Alma visiting and a big feast of possibly undercooked beans and the disastrous gastro-intestinal results.  Unfortunately us back to the land types only had an outhouse.  My poor Grandma.

When I was four we started eating meat again, and for most of my childhood my favorite food was steak.  I remember my 9th birthday the one thing I wanted to do was have a fancy steak dinner with my three best friends, Aislinn, Ingrid, and Tammy.  Somewhere in there I was diagnosed with a wheat sensitivity and told I would eventually grow out of it.  Curious.

Then, when I was about 10, I spent a day on a cousins farm communing with a particularly lovely and kind cow.  Have you ever looked a cow in the eyes?  They have lovely long lashes and the kindest eyes.  I was a rebel type, spending a lot of time protesting for world peace.  It made perfect sense that I became a vegetarian.  I was a dedicated vegetarian for 30 years.  Right up until I started having health problems, stopped eating wheat, and realized that if you can't eat wheat, and don't eat meat, there's not a lot left to eat.

Barbara Kingsolver helped me mentally adjust to the idea of eating meat again.  Her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle  while celebrating all of the things I value about food, local, home grown, organic, nourishing, also spoke to ethical meat eating.  Then came the great local and sustainable food films, Fresh, Food Inc., etc.  Realizing that much of what I had thought about the economics and sustainability of conventional mono-cropped annual grains was wrong, that in fact you could heal land with responsible grazing... oy, to say it caused cognitive dissonance is an epic understatement.  I had always said that I had respect for hunters, that animals raised with respect on healthful diets were a natural and ethical food.  Luckily for me right around this time our Co-op started a meat department featuring ethically sourced, ethically processed meats.  Read the Wendell Berry quote at the Lorentz Meat web site and you will know that they respect animals, and respect life.

Eventually I stumbled upon the Paleo or Primal blogs, and found a community talking about ethical, healthful grass-fed meats.  Since I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes around the same time I started focusing on my carbohydrate intake as well, and suddenly it all came together for me.  A community of people who had a coherent vision of healthful, ethical, low carbohydrate, natural foods.  In a nutshell, the Paleo community believes that we should eat as our Paleolithic, or pre-agricultural ancestors ate.  What exactly that means is open to wild debate and argument, but I like how Kurt Harris approaches it, a prioritized list of what to eliminate first.  Another great approach, and perhaps closest to how I eat is The Perfect Health Diet.

I am sure most of the Paleo community would scorn the wheat my family eats, the fact that I have two vegetarian children, and my occasional corn muffin.  I am also influenced by The Weston Price foundation and their approach to diet, though I don't always sprout my oats and I am not going to eat sourdough bread any time soon.  Perhaps the book Real Food by Nina Plank comes the closest of all to my philosophy.  I have come up with my own version of healthy eating, open to tweaking, that makes my body feel good.  I eat grass fed, local, meats with an emphasis on ruminant meat.  I eat lot's of fresh vegetables, some of them raw.  I eat enough carbohydrate to keep from developing worse insulin resistance than I already have, but not so much that my blood sugar ever goes over 140 an hour after I eat.  I eat a bit of fruit and a bit of dark chocolate and the occasional small serving of dessert, because life is too short not to.  And sometimes I have a corn muffin, because even though I am sure they are not great for me, I love them.  I am not afraid of fat, and in fact think I was probably horribly deficient in good healthy fats for years.  I listen to my body.   Ultimately, as long as you're are eating real food, that's all anyone can do.